Rating: 
Summary: Very interesting, scattered.
Review: I did enjoy the book, but it also seemed like if you weren't either the author or the publisher, you won't be able to understand it.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I first came across this book from a required reading list for an anthropology class in college. What an excellent book. Very historical, very interesting. I re-read it every few years. It will make you laugh, it will make you cry, but most of all, it will give you understanding in the plight of the Native American
people during a regretful era in America's history.
Rating: 
Summary: gruesome battles
Review: I found this to be a very difficult read, particularly the gruesome battle descriptions. Black Elk's visions were hard to imagine, although they were described and redescribed throughout the book. Some stories were reminiscent of events in other religions of the world. I did not end this experience feeling spiritually uplifted, as I had I hoped I would.
Rating:
Summary: Black Elk Speaks
Review: I have to say that Black Elk Speaks is one of the most fascinating books that I've read in a while. It has given me a better understanding of the Lakota people, in particular the significance of visions. The whole process of "civilizing" the American West was a dubious undertaking, the illegitimacy of which has, unfortunately, become distorted by rhetoric and romanticism. This illegitimacy is something that America has naturally been reluctant to face, and it something that will likely never be rectified. Sad really, as what happened to the Lakota, among many others, contradicts quite blatantly the nobel principles that America has, since it's creation, claimed to stand for. Black Elk's story has heightened my understanding of the injustices that the Lakota and other Indians faced. It is an excellent source for those who want a more balanced and truthful account of what happened during c. 1870 to 1890 on the American frontier.
Rating:
Summary: EXCELLENT
Review: I loved the book. Whether you are interested in indian culture or on a spiritual quest, you will find it very interesting ... although sad.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I loved this. But I am fascinated with the Native American struggle, so this was just what I was looking for. The struggle, the ritual, the honor involved with the people of that day - it makes me respect the culture so much. I feel horrible about the way they are/have been treated. Even though the story is many years old, unfortunatly it still applies.
Rating:
Summary: Read this before going West!
Review: I read this book before taking a trip out west through the Black Hills and the Northern Plains - It definitely resulted in a richer experience.
Rating:
Summary: Good, but...
Review: I truly wanted to like this book more than I did. I had read all the great reviews, and have read a great deal of Native American history. Black Elk's first-hand accounts of some of the most famous moments in American history are priceless, as was his description of Sioux culture; these easily rated five stars. But lengthy chunks of this book are descriptions of Black Elk's dream-like visions. They were obviously very personal, and Black Elk even wonders if he should try to recreate them for auhtor John Neihardt. For me, the re-telling of these visions through an interpreter and then written by a white man left the passages a convoluted and overly-detailed morass. I would, however, still recommend that anyone interested in Native American history read this book.
Rating: 
Summary: A glimse of the other side of the story.
Review: I was a student at the time when various fields (Native American studies, Women studies, Afro-American studies, etc.) were just being established, and although I took a minor in anthropology, I never got into the topics underwritten by these new departments. Since I also worked in the book store, I was aware that two of the key texts for Native American studies were Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Black Elk Speaks. Sad to say, but it took me nearly 30 years before I read either book. The former book was written by a sympathetic outsider who painted the American Indian as a helpless victim of European greed--which for the most part he was/is. The latter was dictated to an interested party, John G. Neihardt, and is the words and reminiscences of Nicholas Black Elk, who witnessed as a child or participated in as an adult, some of the major events of the American Indian Wars that were the outcome of the US expansion into the West. For those of us reared on John Ford westerns, manifest destiny and pioneering had a patriotic ring, as well they might most of them having been made in the years immediately following WWII. In the social souring of the sixties and seventies that brought so many discontented groups vocally into the foreground, it became more obvious that the expression of manifest destiny by our European forebearers spelled manifest disaster for the Native American populations across the country. An outgrowth of the discontent of the "younger generation" was the establishment of the afore said departments. That of American Indian studies introduced us to the more honest, or at least more balanced, story of the indigenous people of the country. Black Elk Speaks is a superb eye witness account of the Sioux experience with European expansion into the Dakotas. It is a clear narrative of the frightening attack on a child's village by an invader intent upon killing women, children and the elderly as well as the males of fighting age. It tells of a life that revolves around the buffalo, an animal whose numbers were countless during the author's youth but dwindled to near extinction along with the American Indian himself by the end of the narrator's life. The story is one of growing up in a society where the young learn their roles from all adults by observation and imitation, where each individual graduates into the next age grade together with and by the aide of his peers, and where part of what is learned is not simply ones expected "rights" but ones expected responsibilities as well. Although I enjoyed the story as a whole, I found the narration of the subject's spiritual experiences somewhat tedious, but then I find the repetitive style of the heroic poems of ancient Greece, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, and those of Saxon England, like Beowulf, somewhat difficult also. I am a product of my age, a child of the printed rather than the recited word. Perhaps if I had been reared at the fireside of the great houses of ancient Greece and England I would find myself more at one with the rhythm of this style of story telling. Acknowledging this as my own shortcoming, I will say that my favorite part of the book is the author's story of his adventures with a Wild West show in England, of his having been abandoned there when the Tour went home and of his exploits attempting to get home again. The most moving part of the narrative I'll share with you:
"I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth,--you see me now a pitiful old man who had done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead P. 207)." Powerful.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Reading Material
Review: If you want a look in to the Native American tradition and you want to see everything from the viewpoint of the inside of their expansive belief system, this is the only book that you want to purchase. It tells the tale of Black Elk. Through the tender care of the author his world is brought to life. I found it an exceptional vision for the world. If we would only see the Universe though different eyes, then maybe the world would be able to pull itself from its centries of downward spin and focus more on the aspect of the Self and the Spirit
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